Daily Times

Poor Malala. She has gone from being the bravest girl in the world to the most unfortunate. And to think, she was supposed to give us hope, much like Jo’anna. At least till the morning light. Yet from the moment the school going activist found herself with a bullet to the head in a bid to see her revolution dead – she has been reduced to the most globally commoditised female icon of this century. This is hugely unfair. All Malala ever wanted was for us to see how everybody could live as one.

Yet, to everyone else’s credit, her image has been successfully managed, branded and patented towards this end. Not for the common good, naturally. But, rather, all for their own competing interests.

For once, both Pakistan and the US are on the same page, though with each side quite possibly reading from opposite ends. The Pakistani state, for its part, never misses an opportunity to invoke the name of Malala whenever it wants to show those pesky westerners how ill-informed they are in their assumptions that all Pakistani women are downtrodden to degradation and beyond. Thus the Prime Minister must have thought himself on top of his game when, in a burst of sheer creativity, he hailed Malala as the Pride of Pakistan – and that, too, only for being the youngest ever Nobel Laureate. Nothing more. A far better ‘reward’, perhaps, might have been for the state to reclaim its writ and flush out those hurly burly machomen who shoot little girls for going to school. Yet imagine how deflated he must have felt when he realised that America had come up with the far catchier: ‘we need drones so Malala can live.’ And just like that, in a flash, Malala became the unwitting poster girl for this never-ending global war on terror.

Yet the repackaging of Malala has gone well beyond state opportunism. Pakistan’s political chattering elites have also played their part, whether in the guise of feminist collectives, including male allies, or else as do-gooders at the non-governmental grassroots level. And they forever change the goalposts at whim to suit their ends. Meaning that the same western-educated elite feminists here in Pakistan – the ones who conveniently choose to play the Global South card when seeking to silence First World feminists with blanket accusations of White Saviour Complex – are guilty of replicating this same dynamic in their relations with the rural poor of this country, especially women. Thus these brown memsahibs see nothing exploitative in appropriating the likes of Malala or Mukhtaran Mai to further their own careers. They see no irony in sitting in urban Pakistan, leaving only to road trip it till they get right ‘out in the field’ and conduct their women empowerment sessions before returning to home comforts and well-established privilege. Yet in all this, they have chosen to conveniently forget that both Malala and Mai – though vastly different on paper, one having been brought up as an education activist from a tender age, the other an illiterate village woman who spoke not even the language of the state (she needed, by her own account, a translator for her meeting with the then prime minister) – share one very important advantage. That is, they both enjoyed the full support of their respective fathers. The patriarchy isn’t smashed just because we wish it were so. This also puts that particular engineered narrative into perspective, especially with regard to Mai, which provides that rural men are violent towards women because of that one-size-fits-all ‘justification’: lack of education. Presumably, the former head of the IMF had received sufficient of the stuff to understand that no means no.

We have robbed Malala of her childhood, perhaps as almost much as the Taliban if their will had been done. Now as she prepares for university life, let us hope that she is able to shun the global spotlight. That she will remain beyond the forever-refractive glare of our collective third-eye-blind- shutter-vision voyeurism. It is the very least we owe her.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei